#musings So this needs work…

#musings
So this needs work with the beginning and ending and transitions and consistency in tone…

Teachers go kind of crazy in the summertime. We conceive of all kinds of projects to improve our homes, our classrooms, our teaching practice, our ambitious selves, and imagine that two months will be enough time to accomplish all this, and also take a well-earned vacation. This summer I decided to try to recapture something that I had enjoyed as a teenager: ballet dancing. I signed up for dance classes at a local university’s dance program. I’m the mom of a toddler, about to turn 31, and I haven’t danced seriously since I was 16, but I definitely needed the exercise.

I walked into the first dance class, the one advertised as “level 1-2,” and shrank inside a little. All the other women were at least 10 years younger than me, some as young as 13, barely post-pubescent, all thin and poised in classical ballet attire: black leotard, pink tights, and hair in a severe bun. I was wearing black tights and a workout top, with a ponytail that exposed my gray roots.

After I took a place at the barre, the instructor explained detailed series of exercises, demonstrating in a perfunctory way that assumed lots of knowledge on the parts of her students. She rattled off lots of steps in a complicated sequence, clearly expecting us to remember them all after hearing them only once, and be able to do them to the front, side, back and side, then turn around and do them on the left.

I was lucky enough to be positioned behind the hotshot dancer of the room, a tall girl in pointe shoes with bright blush on her high cheekbones. Keeping my eyes glued to her feet helped me to approximate the steps. That’s really as close as I got: an approximation. My mind knew the steps, but my feet had forgotten them. Before we were halfway through the first combination, I realized my ancient ballet slippers no longer fit me at all. And then we had to turn around, and I floundered until I found another girl to watch, aware all the time that little Margot Fonteyn behind me could see all my mistakes.

We spent most of the class at the barre, pausing between combinations for the instructor to talk about body alignment and which muscles did what when we did the different movements. She asked the girls questions about why they were moving the way they did and troubleshot the various steps with us. One of the messages I remember was the idea that exertion isn’t always the way to execute a step correctly: some steps must be relaxed into, or perform themselves automatically if the body is positioned right. At the very end of class, we did a combination across the floor. It included a pirouette, which I’d totally forgotten how to do. Did you pick up the front or back foot? Which way did you turn? I made sure I had a position in the back and fumbled my way through it.

Walking out of the class, I expected to feel horrible after an hour and a half of staring at my body in skintight clothes standing next to skinny girls half my age. That’s how I would have felt if I’d taken these classes when I was in high school. I would have felt chubby and outclassed, and I might have quit. But to my surprise, I didn’t feel that way at all now. My standards had been radically lowered by 15 years without dancing (and maybe motherhood had something to do with it too). Comparisons no longer even made sense. Instead of feeling discouraged and jealous, I was proud of myself for showing up at all. I was able to look at myself in those floor-to-ceiling mirrors and notice that I did still have a waist, and my collarbones looked nice, and, whoa, my feet had beautiful high arches. Yeah, I messed up the steps, but I liked doing the graceful arm movements and the way tondus and plies made my legs feel strong.

In trying to take apart my body image issues and self-consciousness with a counselor once, I admitted that what I was really afraid of was being the ugly girl in the room. I was always hyper-aware of an unspoken hierarchy of women in any room, from the most beautiful and put-together to the least, and I feared being in the bottom of these rankings. What I discovered as the oldest and least-coordinated woman in ballet class was that when you’ve already clearly “lost” the nonexistent competition it becomes fairly easy to stop giving any fucks at all. Maybe this is one of the reasons why aging is supposed to be so liberating for women. When you’re out after the first round of the continuous beauty pageant that is life as a woman, you find you have other things to worry about besides pointless looks-based competition. You can concentrate on learning the steps instead of sucking in your belly and making duck faces in the mirror.

I’ve read tons of body-acceptance essays, and seen all the memes telling moms to be proud of their “tiger stripe” stretch marks. I agree with these ideas intellectually and politically, but my emotions always refused to buy in completely. Some stubborn part of me insisted that beauty standards exist, and no amount of self-acceptance erases the fact that others will judge us by them. And no matter how much you pretend other people’s opinions don’t matter, those opinions determine the way we get treated, and it’s pretty hard to feel good about yourself if people either treat you like crap or ignore you all the time.

I’m still kind of skeptical about body-acceptance messages that dismiss the hard work of unlearning shame or that pretend self-acceptance is a thing that happens once and for all, rather than a continuing process. But I also think that a lot of that concern for other people’s opinions is sometimes just a projection of a poor self-assessment. It might be hard to believe, but other people are just as self-concerned as you are. That’s why dance teachers encourage self-conscious students by saying, “Don’t worry about the others. They’re all focused on themselves. No one is watching you.” And it was true: the other girls were just so much scenery to me after a while, something to watch to help me keep up with the steps. I wondered if they paid so little attention to me, in turn, that despite my workout top and gray hair I might have actually blended in.

Even though I didn’t become a prima ballerina, or even recapture much of the skill I had half a lifetime ago, I consider the class a success for me. I did something risky, that made me feel nervous and on display, and I survived. Yeah, if I thought about it too much, it was kind of depressing to lower my standards to mere survival, but if I never did that I wouldn’t try new things and grow. I knew I would stink at ballet, but I signed up for the class anyway, and that choice necessitated accepting failure ahead of time. Brene Brown says, “When failure is not an option, you can forget about creativity, learning, and innovation.” Maybe I can go a step farther: it’s only in the midst of failure that it’s possible to learn this lesson about self-acceptance and courage, and thus unlearn perfectionism. After all, even a thirty-year-old, out-of-shape ballet dancer in ill-fitting shoes can learn a new step, and with it, a bit of grace.

Sorry about the delay on this. It’s been a busy week, and I’ve had little time to devote to the workshop. This is first on my Musings to-do list, though!

Katie M.
9:12 pm on June 18, 2015

Overall I thought this was nicely written, and that you’ve got something good to say, I’d just edit a bunch to make sure your main point really stands out.

Specifically, I’d take out:
1. All except the last three sentences of the first paragraph
2. Everything after “But to my surprise, I didn’t feel that way at all now” through “Even though I didn’t become a prima ballerina”
3. In the last paragraph, everything but the first two and final sentences.

That probably sounds like a lot, but the idea is to cut this down so you have a really sharp focus–then maybe you can add in a few key phrases back in from what you cut (e.g., I liked the bit about noticing your high arches). Plus, if you leave out those parts I think the overall tone will be more consistent.

Wow, that’s cutting a lot, including what feels to me like the heart or meaning of the piece. What if as a compromise, I left the paragraph that ends with tondus and plies, and the entire final paragraph, but cut the entire 3 paragraphs between? Does that improve the focus and tone consistency? I think that does get rid of some repetition and some excessive navel-gazing.

Sorry I haven’t had a chance to really look at this closely yet (i.e., my feedback is still forthcoming), but maybe it will help if you condense your core message down to one or two sentences?

That may help us give you feedback that will allow you to deliver your message, but not lose any of it.

Katie M.
1:03 pm on June 20, 2015

Sure, but I’d still work on editing down those paragraphs. There are some good parts, but I think you can ditch some pieces. The quote, for example–can you just explain what it means to you, without the actual quote?

I agree with Katie that the piece needs to be cut down, but I’m fine with your edits not being nearly as extensive as the ones Katie suggested.

My main issue is that as I was reading through the dance story, I had zero clue what the point was. As such, I think you need to add some sort of introduction or teaser at the beginning — something that will make us read the story, wondering how you’re going to resolve the core problem you (hopefully) tease us about in the beginning.

Once you have that intro down (and I still think you should write that one- to two-sentence core message to help you focus), I think you’ll have an easier time going through the body and deciding what lines contribute to the message, and what lines are extraneous and can be cut.

I like the idea of adding something about the meaning to the introduction. Without that it puts a lot of pressure on the story of the ballet class to be fascinating for its own sake. Obviously the part about teachers going nuts in the summer is dumb.

The lines from the piece that I think come closest to the meaning of the experience are:

-Instead of feeling discouraged and jealous, I was proud of myself for showing up at all
-I did something risky, that made me feel nervous and on display, and I survived.
-it’s only in the midst of failure that it’s possible to learn this lesson about self-acceptance and courage, and thus unlearn perfectionism.

To boil it down further, I guess I’d say the point is that taking risks sometimes means accepting a high likelihood of failure ahead of time, but those are the kinds of risks that pay off the most because that’s how you grow. It’s about building resilience. The details of the dance class are all things that might have contributed to me feeling horrible about myself if I hadn’t accepted ahead of time that I was going to be the worst dancer in the room. But since my goal was mere survival, I was able to use those little things as practice letting things slide off my back rather than undermining my confidence. The comparison game I discuss a bit is part of that I guess. I hope that makes some sense. I’ll try to post a new draft in a couple days.

Gotcha. I think that’s definitely a good lesson. In that respect, the isolated line I found most intriguing was this:

“I did something risky, that made me feel nervous and on display, and I survived.”

That definitely has a “suspenseful teaser” sort of element to it, so I wonder if that should be worked into the introduction somehow. Make people wonder and want to know what that risky thing you did was, and how you scathed you came out of it….

This summer I decided to do something that would push my limits, force me to confront my insecurities, and put me at risk of extreme embarrassment. I signed up for dance classes at a local university’s dance program. I’m the mom of a toddler, about to turn 31, and I haven’t danced seriously since I was 16, but I definitely needed the exercise.

I walked into the first dance class, the one advertised as “level 1-2,” and shrank inside a little. All the other women were at least 10 years younger than me, some as young as 13, barely post-pubescent, all thin and poised in classical ballet attire: black leotard, pink tights, and hair in a severe bun. I was wearing black tights and a workout top, with a ponytail that exposed my gray roots.

After I took a place at the barre, the instructor explained detailed series of exercises, demonstrating in a perfunctory way that assumed lots of knowledge on the parts of her students. She rattled off lots of steps in a complicated sequence, clearly expecting us to remember them all after hearing them only once, and be able to do them to the front, side, back, and side, then turn around and do them on the left.

I was lucky enough to be positioned behind the hotshot dancer of the room, a tall girl in pointe shoes with bright blush on her high cheekbones. Keeping my eyes glued to her feet helped me to approximate the steps. That’s really as close as I got: an approximation. My mind knew the steps, but my feet had forgotten them. Before we were halfway through the first combination, I realized my ancient ballet slippers no longer fit me at all. And then we had to turn around, and I floundered until I found another girl to watch, aware all the time that little Margot Fonteyn behind me could see all my mistakes.

We spent most of the class at the barre, pausing between combinations for the instructor to talk about body alignment and which muscles did what when we did the different movements. She asked the girls questions about why they were moving the way they did and troubleshot the various steps with us. One of the messages I remember was the idea that exertion isn’t always the way to execute a step correctly: some steps must be relaxed into, or perform themselves automatically if the body is positioned right. At the very end of class, we did a combination across the floor. It included a pirouette, which I’d totally forgotten how to do. Did you pick up the front or back foot? Which way did you turn? I made sure I had a position in the back and fumbled my way through it.

Walking out of the class, I expected to feel horrible after an hour and a half of staring at my body in skintight clothes standing next to skinny girls half my age. That’s how I would have felt if I’d taken these classes when I was in high school. I would have felt chubby and outclassed, and I might have quit. But to my surprise, I didn’t feel that way at all now. My standards had been radically lowered by 15 years without dancing (and maybe motherhood had something to do with it too). Comparisons no longer even made sense. Instead of feeling discouraged and jealous, I was proud of myself for showing up at all. I was able to look at myself in those floor-to-ceiling mirrors and notice that I did still have a waist, and my collarbones looked nice, and, whoa, my feet had beautiful high arches. Yeah, I messed up the steps, but I liked doing the graceful arm movements and the way tondus and plies made my legs feel strong.

I’m still kind of skeptical about body-acceptance messages that dismiss the hard work of unlearning shame or that pretend self-acceptance is a thing that happens once and for all, rather than a continuing process. But what I discovered as the oldest and least coordinated dancer in ballet class was that giving up on winning the continuous beauty pageant that is life as a woman can feel like a humungous relief. Maybe this is one of the reasons why aging is supposed to be so liberating for women.

Even though I didn’t become a prima ballerina, or even recapture much of the skill I had half a lifetime ago, I consider the class a success for me. I did something risky, that made me feel nervous and on display, and I survived. Sure, my younger self would have thought it was kind of depressing to lower my standards to mere survival, but if I never did that I’d never try new things and grow. I knew I would stink at ballet, but I signed up for the class anyway, and that choice necessitated accepting failure ahead of time. It’s only in the midst of failure that it’s possible to learn this lesson about self-acceptance and courage, and thus unlearn perfectionism. After all, even a thirty-year-old, out-of-shape ballet dancer in ill-fitting shoes can learn a new step, and with it, a bit of grace.

Okay, I think this is getting closer. My main issue now is that it feels like a very abrupt start with the new intro. You do tell us how you took this big risk, but you don’t give us any backstory as to why you decided to take it. You just dive right in. And I think that’s going to leave the audience wondering, “Why?”

As such, I think you need to generate a bit of empathy for yourself first. Get the audience to understand how you’ve been feeling and why taking this risk was so important to you. Otherwise, they’re just not going to care that you took such a big risk and will check out before your story even begins.

Anyway, what I’m envisioning as far as an intro at this point is something like this:

You’re a relatively new mom, and you feel like your physical fitness has fallen by the wayside (pure conjecture here — I’m just offering up an example of something that can be a motivation for you).

You decide you need to do something different, challenge yourself. But how?

Oh! What about a dance class?

And then you dive into your story.

I feel like that kind of opening would pull me into your story more and help me root for you to do well in your class. 🙂

Oh, and just to wrap up… if you go this route, I think it will make your ultimate lesson more powerful:

Sure, you may have “let yourself go” a bit. And sure, you may have been bummed about it at first. But after taking the class and enjoying it, you realized that it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things if you’re body is no longer that of a childless 21-year-old.

By the way, I know that this is kind of a different lesson that what you posted above, but it’s how I’m reading it at this point. The lesson about taking risks and accepting failure is a bit more broad, and I feel like people aren’t going to relate to it as well. So maybe this slight change of course will help focus the piece a bit. I think both lessons are tied closely together enough that you can mash it into one overarching lesson.

Sorry for the delay on this new draft.
I gave it a new opening, which might have taken it on a bit of a tangent. I made the rest of it focus a little more on the body image stuff than the more abstract stuff about accepting failure, and changed the last paragraph.

I was lucky. After I had my first child, I got back down to my pre-baby weight without dieting or exercising. The problem came a couple years later. When I stopped breastfeeding, I forgot to stop eating as if I were producing milk, and the extra calories started to add up. My thighs felt jiggly and my belly had an extra roll in it. I decided I needed to get back in shape.

Except, I’d found lifting weights and chugging away on the elliptical to be so boring that my mind would just fill with self-recriminating thoughts about the bad things I shouldn’t have eaten and my disgusting body. Working out purely for the purpose of losing weight feels like punishing yourself for living. To keep trips to the gym from becoming an exercise in self-loathing, I needed to find a form of exercise that was so engaging I wouldn’t have to distract myself from it. I wanted an exercise I could get excited about doing for its own sake, not for the sake of the results I hoped it would have on my body.

The only times in my memory when I had been truly engaged by exercise had been in high school, when I played volleyball and took dance classes. I didn’t think I’d be able to find an adult volleyball team that would welcome an out-of-practice 5’1″ player who had never had a consistent overhand serve. So I signed up for dance classes. I was nervous because I hadn’t danced for over a decade, but I thought taking the risk would be good for me.

I walked into the first ballet class, the one advertised as “level 1-2,” and shrank inside a little. All the other women were at least 10 years younger than me, some as young as 13, barely post-pubescent, all thin and poised in classical ballet attire: black leotard, pink tights, and hair in a severe bun. I was wearing black tights and a workout top, with a ponytail that exposed my gray roots.

After I took a place at the barre, the instructor explained detailed series of exercises, demonstrating in a perfunctory way that assumed lots of knowledge on the parts of her students. She rattled off lots of steps in a complicated sequence, clearly expecting us to remember them all after hearing them only once, and be able to do them to the front, side, back, and side, then turn around and do them on the left.

I was lucky enough to be positioned behind the hotshot dancer of the room, a tall girl in pointe shoes with bright blush on her high cheekbones. Keeping my eyes glued to her feet helped me to approximate the steps. That’s really as close as I got: an approximation. My mind knew the steps, but my feet had forgotten them. Before we were halfway through the first combination, I realized my ancient ballet slippers no longer fit me at all. And then we had to turn around, and I floundered until I found another girl to watch, aware all the time that little Margot Fonteyn behind me could see all my mistakes.

We spent most of the class at the barre, pausing between combinations for the instructor to talk about body alignment and which muscles did what when we did the different movements. She asked the girls questions about why they were moving the way they did and troubleshot the various steps with us. One of the messages I remember was the idea that exertion isn’t always the way to execute a step correctly: some steps must be relaxed into, or perform themselves automatically if the body is positioned right. At the very end of class, we did a combination across the floor. It included a pirouette, which I’d totally forgotten how to do. Did you pick up the front or back foot? Which way did you turn? I made sure I had a position in the back and fumbled my way through it.

Walking out of the class, I expected to feel horrible after an hour and a half of staring at my body in skintight clothes standing next to skinny girls half my age. That’s how I would have felt if I’d taken these classes when I was in high school. I would have felt chubby and outclassed, and I might have quit. But to my surprise, I didn’t feel that way at all now. My standards had been radically lowered by 15 years without dancing (and maybe motherhood had something to do with it too). Comparisons no longer even made sense. Instead of feeling discouraged and jealous, I was proud of myself for showing up at all. I had been too focused on doing the steps right to worry about the other girls’ youth and beauty, or launch my usual self-loathing inner monologue. What’s more, I was able to look at myself in those floor-to-ceiling mirrors and notice that I did still have a waist, and my collarbones looked nice, and, whoa, my feet had beautiful high arches. Yeah, I messed up the steps, but I liked doing the graceful arm movements and the way tondus and plies made my legs feel strong.

I’m still kind of skeptical about body-acceptance messages that dismiss the hard work of unlearning shame or that pretend self-acceptance is a thing that happens once and for all, rather than a continuing process. But what I discovered as the oldest and least coordinated dancer in ballet class was that giving up on winning the continuous beauty pageant that is life as a woman can feel like a humungous relief. Maybe this is one of the reasons why aging is supposed to be so liberating for women.

Even though I didn’t become a prima ballerina, lose five pounds, or even recapture much of the skill I had half a lifetime ago, I consider the class a success for me. I did something risky, that made me feel nervous and on display, and I survived. Immersing myself in an intense but fun activity was the best way to short circuit the connection my brain had made between exercise and self-hatred. It even gave me a chance to appreciate the small pieces of beauty I do still possess. It didn’t matter that I didn’t dance very well. In fact I think it’s only in the midst of failure that it’s possible to learn this lesson about self-acceptance and courage, and thus unlearn perfectionism. After all, even a thirty-year-old, out-of-shape ballet dancer in ill-fitting shoes can learn a new step, and with it, a bit of grace.

Okay, now that I’ve had a chance to read through this and really digest, I admit I’m somewhat torn….

First off, I love the new introduction. I think you make some insightful — and witty — points there, and I like the way you give us the backstory for why you decided to take the dance class.

My main issue is that now it takes you three paragraphs to get to the “meat” of the story, so I feel like you might have a little too much exposition at this point. Given that, the only thing I can think of to cut would be the two sentences about playing volleyball in high school. The self-deprecating comment about being an out-of-practice 5’1″ player who never had a consistent serve made me chuckle, but it is kind of tangential. Notice that you can segue straight from “I wanted an exercise I could get excited about…” to “So I signed up for dance classes…,” and it doesn’t even feel like you’re missing something there.

Anyway, I think this is close enough now, so go ahead and post it as a draft on Musings. I think we can still try to shave the intro a bit, but if you post it to Musings, we can play around with the flow and still have drafts we can fall back on if it doesn’t work.

We also have to think of a title, and if you can look for a photo, that would be great. I’m trying to be better about sticking with copyright law now, so here’s a good place to go for creative commons images (i.e., images we can use without having to pay royalties):